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When Data And Flying Becomes Really Interesting

The joy of flying and visualisation combine in Contrailz, an interesting project from Russian software engineer Alexey Papulovskiy and his collaborator Nikolay Guryanov.

There are those of us who find beauty in these transport patterns and no doubt others who see them as evidence of the beastly spread of CO2 emissions.

For lovers of abstract art these visualisations have a certain ring of familiarity as the Singapore/Malaysia and Mumbai maps (above) and Stockholm (below) demonstrates.

Alexy began by collecting tracking data for civil plane routes from Planefinder.net. The data set of 1 billion “dots” was for the month of October,2012.

Flight Levels are colour coded, with the red signifying lower altitudes and blue, higher altitudes. The project mapping demonstrates that commercial aircraft have specific routes that they follow and these routes regularly intersect.

All of which goes to show why you can see so many aircraft at different holding altitudes as you are preparing to land at a busy airport such as Changi or Heathrow (below).

And while you suddenly realise how much you are in the hands of your pilot and rush to check your travel insurance, take a good look at the data source, PlaneFinder. It picks up “ADS-B plane feeds used by commercial and private planes to transmit their name, position, callsign, status and lots more.”

No business should ever be on ‘auto pilot’. To avoid the chance of crashing there are tools which can help them manage their data to avoid such a calamity.

Managing critical data within an enterprise is something that Web Synergies excels at. Whether it is data migration or using a full Business Intelligence (BI) solution to integrate data from every department we can assist you.